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Does monday.com have dependencies?

To answer briefly, all of our boards, groups, and pulses are independent of one another, so when one of those elements is changed, it won't affect another. We did this in order to encourage communication and collaboration amongst team members so that the workflow is more efficient. Sometimes when changes are automatic, tasks slip through the cracks, and we don't want that to happen for you and your team!

That being said, we do still have some ways that you can represent dependencies in the platform while encouraging your team to interact with one another:

HIGH LEVEL BOARD

One workaround for setting up dependent tasks is to use a High Level Board structure, like the one shown here:

In that example above, there are three status columns next to one another, and each one represents the phases of a project or task. Each phase needs to be completed in order, from left to right.

Another way to construct task dependencies is by using the groups on your board to represent the phases of the project. Each group will contain multiple pulses, which are the tasks you need to complete for each phase. Here is an example of what that would look like for the phases of a project that starts with the "Design" phase and ends with the "Assembly" phase:

You can set up a board with a similar structure by using the “Project Plan” featured template. You can find more information about using our templates here.

*NEW*In addition to this, you can use the new Formula column to set up an IF formula so that the status column will automatically affect the result in the Formula column. Here is an example formula you could use: IF({Status}="Done","start phase 2","still working on phase 1")

The result would look like this:

You can read more about setting up a formula like this through this article under "Get a value based on several conditions." The full list of formulas can be found here.

COMMUNICATING ABOUT NEXT STEPS

As for the communication aspect of dependencies, team members can send notifications to one another whenever they complete a step so that the next person can start the next phase.

Here is an example:

When a user changes the status of task A to "done," they can leave a note in that status and @mention the next person in line to start task B.

@mentioning a team member

Fig1. - View of @ mentioning team member from Status label.

You can also @mention the pulse or "Task B" in the status note and say that this task can now be started.